Aeon 5.4.8 — the Joomla 5 native rebuild, now actually available to download. This release ships against Joomla 5.4.8 and bundles VirtueMart 4.8.0.

Please read this if you last downloaded Aeon before today. The 5.4.7 entry below was published on 11 August, but through an error on our side the 5.4.7 files were placed in the wrong folder and never appeared in your downloads area. The download you have been seeing is still the August 2025 build (18.08.2025 5.3.0/4.4.4). 5.4.8 is the first Joomla-5-native Aeon you can actually download, and it contains everything described in the 5.4.7 entry below as well as the changes listed here. We are sorry for the delay.

Updated in 5.4.8

• VirtueMart 4.8.0. The quickstart previously bundled VirtueMart 4.6.8. 4.8.0 is a security release from the VirtueMart team, and it is the version the template is now tested against. If you run an existing store, update VirtueMart on your own site as well — this template change does not update it for you.
• Joomla 5.4.8. The quickstart installs Joomla 5.4.8, the current release. The previous quickstart in your downloads area was an Akeeba backup archive built in August 2025.
• A new quickstart format. The quickstart is now an ordinary Joomla distribution — unzip it, browse to the site, and run Joomla's own installation wizard, where you create your own administrator account. The old Akeeba .jpa + Kickstart route shipped a shared administrator password to every customer; this one does not.

Removed from the package

Housekeeping in what is shipped. None of this changes how the template looks or behaves.

• Two backup archives that were shipping inside the template — js.zip and html/mod_menu.zip. They were never referenced by the template and were not declared in its manifest; they were simply old copies of files that had been left in the folder.
• An unused copy of Bootstrap 2 (css/bootstrap/). Nothing loaded it — confirmed by recording every asset the pages actually request — and the template now uses Joomla 5's own Bootstrap 5.
• A dead administrator script and the old colour-picker library it went with (utils/admin-js.js, utils/js_colourchanger/). The script requested a path that could not exist on a Linux server, so it returned a 404 on every load of the Template Options screen. The colour fields now use a modern picker instead.
• An unused Joomla template (vmbasic) that came in with the original sample data and was still being installed by the quickstart, along with two abandoned menu items sitting in the trash pointing at a template style that no longer exists.

What "Joomla 5 native" means, in short

The full detail is in the 5.4.7 entry below. In summary, the template has been moved off the Joomla 3 era code it was originally written against — Bootstrap 2, MooTools-era scripts and jQuery plugins that no longer ship with Joomla 5 — and onto Joomla 5's own Bootstrap 5 foundation. Along the way the login pop-up, the mobile layout, the product grid, the slideshow controls on touch devices and the Template Options screen were all repaired or rebuilt, and Font Awesome was updated to version 6.

Verification

The public demo was promoted to this build and driven in a real browser before release: the home page, a VirtueMart category page and the shopping cart all render with no PHP errors and no JavaScript errors. The shipped package and the quickstart were opened after they were built and their version, release date, bundled Joomla core and bundled VirtueMart version read back from inside the files rather than taken from the build log.

Demo: demo.virtuemarttemplates.net/Joomla5/Aeon/

Aeon 5.4.7 — Joomla 5 native release. This is the first release of Aeon rebuilt for Joomla 5. The template has been moved off the Joomla 3 era code it was originally written against — Bootstrap 2, MooTools-era scripts and jQuery plugins that no longer exist in Joomla 5 — and onto Joomla 5's own Bootstrap 5 foundation. The version number matches the Joomla release it ships against, Joomla 5.4.7.

Added

• Favicon picker. Template Options now has a Favicon tab where you can choose your own icon from the media manager. It outputs the correct link tags, an Apple touch icon, and falls back to the template's own icon if you leave it empty.
• A proper mobile menu. A hamburger button opens a full off-canvas drawer with expandable sub-menus, alongside a row of account, register, search and social buttons sized for touch.
• Modern social networks. The social bar now offers X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, Pinterest, Discord and RSS, drawn with Font Awesome 6 icons.

Changed

• Bootstrap 2 replaced with Bootstrap 5 throughout the template's own markup, matching what Joomla 5 ships.
• All 39 on/off switches in Template Options converted from the Joomla 3 style checkbox to Joomla 5's native switcher control.
• Every colour setting now uses a real colour picker with a live swatch. Previously these were plain text boxes on Joomla 5 — you had to know the hex code and type it correctly.
• The login pop-up now uses Bootstrap 5's own dialog handling instead of the retired Bootstrap 2 version.
• Menu dropdowns are now driven by the template's own code rather than the Superfish and Supersubs jQuery plugins.
• Background images are handled with standard CSS instead of the jQuery Backstretch plugin.
• Google Fonts load through a normal stylesheet link rather than a JavaScript font loader, so text no longer flashes unstyled while the page loads.
• Font Awesome updated to version 6.5.2 (with compatibility shims, so any version 4 icon names in your own content keep working).
• The Template Options tabs were renamed for clarity — for example "Template Header And Footer Custom Code" is now "Header & Footer Custom Code".
• Slideshow behaviour — transition speed, auto-advance, pagination and arrows — is still read from your existing slideshow settings, so a site that had them configured keeps the same behaviour.

Fixed

• The page layout collapsed into a single column. The sidebar and main content stacked on top of each other instead of sitting side by side, the footer columns stacked, and pages ran roughly 1,000 pixels taller than they should. The rewritten markup was not being given the stylesheet that lays it out.
• A band of empty white space above the site, with the main menu pushed hard against the left edge. The fixed header bar had lost its positioning.
• The product grid stopped short of the right-hand edge, leaving a wide gap down the side of shop pages.
• Bullet points appeared beside the manufacturer logos.
• Social icons showed two images at once — the old sprite behind the new icon — and were not centred in their circles.
• The login and registration pop-up had bullet points beside its links, and the "Remember Me" checkbox stretched across the full width on its own line instead of sitting beside its label.
• A page could not be logged into from a phone in some cases because the pop-up's form validation used a Joomla 3 call that Joomla 5 removed, producing a 500 error. Thank you, Zoltán, for reporting this.
• Missing icon font. The template asked Joomla for an icon font that was removed in Joomla 4, producing four failed requests on every page load and a stray character where the search icon should be.
• Pagination arrows showed as empty squares on Joomla 4 and later.
• Long single-column articles were clipped to their headline in the Featured Articles view.
• The search button was detached from its search box.
• A stylesheet that does not exist was requested on every page load, producing a 404 each time.
• Broken administrator script. A missing JavaScript file was requested on every Template Options page, and the file it pointed at had a capitalisation error that would never resolve on a Linux server.
• The template's Details panel in the administrator was unreadable in Joomla's dark theme — grey text with a white shadow on a dark background.
• Joomla 5.4's "What's New" tour took over the first visit to the administrator, sending every link to the dashboard instead of where you clicked. The tour still works; it just no longer starts by itself.

On phones and tablets

• A large band of empty space at the top of every page.
• The slideshow had no visible way to move between slides — the arrows only appeared on hover, which a touchscreen never does.
• Tapping the cart opened a narrow sliver instead of the cart panel. The panel is now centred on screen.
• The header put the currency selector and cart above the logo. The logo and menu button now come first, with the currency selector and cart on their own row beneath, both centred.
• The "3 Easy Steps" banner was cut off at the right edge.
• The search box and its button sat on separate lines, and the button had no visible icon.
• The account, register, search and social buttons were rendered at zero size and could not be tapped at all.
• Module areas were unnecessarily narrow, carrying a desktop-sized margin on a phone screen.

Removed

• Internet Explorer compatibility code and the browser-detection shims that went with it.
• Retired jQuery plugins — Backstretch, DropKick, Superfish, Supersubs and jQuery Mobile — none of which work with the jQuery version Joomla 5 ships.
• Unused Bootstrap 2 files left over from the original build.
• Three unused templates that came in with the original sample data, and abandoned menu items in the trash that pointed at a template style which no longer exists. These shipped inside the quickstart and served no purpose.

Security and code quality

• 143 output-escaping guards added across 124 places where template settings are printed into the page, hardening against cross-site scripting.
• 174 references to Joomla 3 class names that Joomla 5 has removed were updated to their current equivalents.
• Direct-access protection added to the template's entry file.

Verification

Aeon was checked side by side against the original at desktop, tablet and phone widths, and driven in a real browser rather than only inspected as code. The home page now loads with no JavaScript errors at all, where the pre-release version produces two. The administrator's Template Options screen passes a full check of its own — clean console, readable tab labels, working colour pickers, the favicon tab, and correct rendering in both the light and dark administrator themes.

With thanks to Michael Mullan, whose Expression bug report led to the maintenance pass that several of the fixes above came from, and to Zoltán for reporting the login form error.

• Upgraded - Now compatible Joomla 5
• Upgraded - Now compatible Virtuemart 4.4.4
• Fixed - Minor bugs

• Fixed - Minor bugs with cart

• Upgraded - Now compatible Joomla 5
• Upgraded - Now compatible VirtueMart 4.2.12
• Fixed - Minor bugs

• Fixed - Minor Bugs

• Fixed - VirtueMart Products Module bug
• Fixed - Double ReCaptcha on VirtueMart Registration page
• Fixed - Template toggle button not displaying

• Fixed - Menu Params error for adding in image on menu

• Fixed - Template updated to be compatible with Joomla 4.3

• Fixed - Joomla 3.10.11
• Fixed - Template updated for PHP 8.0